Negotiating what counts as English language teaching: official curriculum and its enactment in two Singaporean secondary classrooms

Abstract

In his 1996 essay on curricula in an age of globalisation, Kress points to the role of the state and its educational system as determining actors when it comes to responding to the effects and pressures of the heteroglossia, hybridity, multilingualism and plurality of semiotic forms that characterise a global era. What is needed, he argues, are ‘relevant and productive curricula’, which teach ‘quite new kinds of dispositions, attitudes and skills’, going beyond the teaching of static forms. In order to give students access to the ways and modes of communication which will be essential in the future, language curricula would have to make it their priority to raise students' awareness of the relative value of linguistic resources and to provide them with the dexterity to act relevantly in and through language in a wide variety of continually shifting social and geographical spaces. This article describes how the 2001 English language syllabus in Singapore schools, though with its foregrounding of students' ability to negotiate language in a wide array of contexts an enlightened response to Kress's call, has run the danger of being undermined in favour of a back‐to‐basics agenda. Looking at classroom observation and interview data from two representative Secondary 2 teachers, it provides an account of how they assemble and negotiate the objectives of the official curriculum of the syllabus as they understand them. The article shows that the lack of congruence that emerges between official and enacted curriculum is the result of an array of factors, among which competing demands and discourses around teaching English, inadequate systemic support, and rather anachronistic ways of theorising text and text‐type or genre, appear the most obvious.

Keywords:

• restructuring curriculum
• English language
• literacy
• secondary school
• text type
• teacher agency

Notes

1. Since Singapore's independence in 1965, education in English has replaced vernacular education in all schools and, along with this move, English Language has become one of the most important school subjects. The policy of giving English ‘first language’ position in schools was implemented for pragmatic reasons to do with Singapore's colonial heritage, the status of English as the language of global capitalism, and to bond through an ethnically ‘neutral’ tongue a national mix of Chinese (77%), Malays (14.1%), Indians (7.1%) and others (mostly Eurasians), who all speak their own vernacular. With English being the premium resource in Singapore's linguistic market, increasingly more families, usually those who fall into the higher income groups, speak English at home (in the early 2000s more than a third of the population). At the same time, students are expected to study as a separate academic subject the language associated with their ethnicity as ‘mother tongue second language’. This bilingual policy, referred to as ‘English‐knowing bilingualism’ (Pakir 1991) by local academics, has to be seen as the outcome of the desire to have access to western science and technology while securing each student's ethnic identity and Singapore's ‘Asian‐ness’.

2. To quote the 2001 English language syllabus, ‘Literacy development is at the heart of an English language instructional programme in school’ (English Language Syllabus 2001, 7).

3. The project has been funded by the Centre for Pedagogy and Practice at the National Institute of Education, Singapore, which is itself funded by the Singapore Ministry of Education.

4. When the English classrooms in this study were subsequently compared with those of a nationwide descriptive study of 600 classrooms which was under way at the same time (Luke et al. 2004) employing a similar coding framework, they turned out to be fairly typical of secondary English classrooms more generally in Singapore.